September 30,2022
Dear Benjamin,

Thank you for your letter. When you interpret my high school essay about the 
family as the Christian instrument for making "the world a better place", 
keep in mind that I was only 15 years old, that I had spent the preceding six 
years in a backwoods community where our subsistence was contingent on my 
father's required conversion to Christianity as a "medical missionary". I had
I interpret this experience as analogous tothe forced conversion of Spanish
Jews in the 15th Century by Ferdinand and Isabella. My role in the conversion
was going to "Sunday School" and attending church. Later, in order to protect
my parents from having the house that they had been promised taken away from
them, I would become a "Junior Medical Missionary" myself, - but that's another
story perhaps for a later letter.  By 1942, my parents had concluded that the 
local schooling was inadequate for their children. Through the agency of their
patron, the United Lutheran Church in America, they found the Lankenau Boarding
School for my sister in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. For me they
found a place in the 8th grade of Germantown Friends School, and a foster
home with the family of a Lutheran postal clerk named Gruber who lived on 
McCallum Street in nearby Mount Airy. But I was unhappy, I was homesick, 
as I had been in Chappaqua and Canaan three years earlier, and I went back 
to my parents in January 1943. In addition to doing time in the local 
Konnarock  schools, I spent the ensuing two and a half years in Konnarock, 
teaching myself, kearning to be a do-it-yourselfer. When, on returning to 
Germantown Friends School in September 1945,  the teachers tested me, they
concluded that I was ready for 12th grade. I was by far the youngest member 
of my class.

In those years, as I suspect is the case even now, the Quakers, "The Society
of Friends" as they call themselves, were alienated from the clergy, from
the creeds, from the liturgy, the ritual, the music, the poetry and the visual art of more
traditional religions. They convene in weekly "Meetings" loosely supervised
by "Elders" where congregants sit together for one hour in a silence which
is intermittently interrupted, when someone rises to share a thought with
which he has been inspired. The energy of the members of the Meeting 
is directed toward improving not so much themselves as the world around them.

Accordingly, the instruction in Germantown Friends School was entirely secular.
We studied Milton's Lycidas, not Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's Macbeth, 
not Genesis,Exodus, the Psalms, Job or Isaiah. The focus of the School's
instruction in "Religion" was how to employ "Christianity" to improve the 
world. My answer: start at home, with the family, so pleased the teacher, 
Burton Fowler, who happened to be the principal of Germantown Friends
School, and whenlater that academic year Harvard rejected my application, 
nominally because I was "too young", but perhaps also because its list
of Jewish applicants was full, Mr. Fowler persuaded his acquaintance,
Richard Gummere, the Harvard dean of admissions, to make an exception for me
and to tack my name onto the end of the list. That's how I got into college.

I can count on my fingers, the public religious services in
which I've participated away from Konnarock after leaving there in 1945.
1) Margaret's and my wedding on March 8, 1952, 2) Klemens and Lauras wedding,
3) Rebekah's bat mitzvah, 4) Nathaniel's bar mitzvah, 5) your bar mitzvah,
and 6) Rebekah's wedding. 

Attendance at religious services makes me feel isolated, misunderstood 
and sometimes very lonely. Behind the curtain, or behind closed doors,
however, I am an avid amateur, do-it-yourself theologian, no-one's 
disciple, but an interested reader of Søren Kierkegaard's books.
For many years, I have interpreted 
religion functionally as the ultimate intersection between the herd and 
its members.
I understand God as the highest possible common denominator for
the inward subjectivity of the individual and the public objectivity
of society.

In the opening chapter of the first volume of my novels, I invented a
discussion between a student and his teacher:

"Ich bin, wissen sie, Herr Professor, in einem protestantischen Glaubensbekenntnis auferzogen worden. Man hat mich überzeugt, dass die Bibel das Wort Gottes sei, und dass des Menschen Beziehung zu Gott darauf beruhe, dass ihm die Möglichkeit gegeben ist, dieses Wort Gottes für sich selbst, auf eigene Weise zu deuten. Sehen sie, Herr Professor, es ist doch genau dies was wir in unserem Berufe zu leisten beanspruchen. Hat nicht die Reformation das Literaturverständnis zur Religion erhoben, und die Religion als Literaturverständnis gedeutet?"

[I was brought up in a Protestant denomination to be convinced that the Bible
was the word of God, and that a man's relationship to his god was contingent
on the possibility of man's interpreting this Word of God in man's own way.
Precisely this is the imperative of the study of literature. Did not the 
Protestant Reformation designate religion to be the study of literature,
and elevate the reading and writing of literature to a religion?]

Consistent with the foregoing assertion, I consider the reading and writing
to which I have devoted so large a part of my life as an essentially
religious endeavor. The foci of my understanding of the Bible are 
1) The discovery of subjectivity, Exodus 3:1-15
2) The discovery of art, Numbers 21:4-9
3) The discovery of justice, Isaiah 53:1-12